The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 25 October 2016

WHY OCTOBER 25, 1971 IS IMPORTANT FOR INDIA

25 October is an important day for China. It was on this day that China was voted in by the United Nations General Assembly and Taiwan was thrown out.

It was on this day in 1971 that China, as we know the country today, started on the path to become a global power in a true senses - with its place as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) - and a roadmap laid before it where it would have access to geopolitics and global markets.

October 25, 1971 is also important for India. It was on this day that India was officially pushed to the league of nations that didn't matter, nation who had no say in the global matters, the pariah nations who were at best tools to populate international organisations like the UN. The process of India's official downfall had started much before but India's hara-kiri was cemented on this day.

There are no second thoughts about it that despites being India's largest trading partner, China is India's main adversary, has fought a full-scale war with India and is engaged in a bitter border tussle. China, in fact, has illegally occupied a large swath of the Indian territory in Jammu & Kashmir and claims Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state, as its own.

And it leaves no opportunity to express its displeasure, be it the visits of dignitaries, like it did with US Ambassador Richard Verma's Arunachal visit yesterday or its practice of not issuing or issuing stapled visas to people having Arunachal Pradesh association.

China, in fact, uses every opportunity to humiliate India. It leverages the highly skewed trade balance in its favour to challenge India to take tough stand on Chinese overtures like opposing India's move to ban JeM terrorist Masood Azhar in the United Nations or blocking India's entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) or provoking or equipping Pakistan against India.

And China has been doing it for long, ever since it betrayed India's and Jawaharlal Nehru's trust with the 1962 war. Yes, it was because of the Nehruvian policies that India was forced to trust a deceptive country like China and it was because of Nehruvian policies that China could get what should have been rightly India's - be it the UNSC membership or nuclear capability. 

And it owes its genesis to the Nehruvian foreign policies, especially in regard to China, that pushed India decades back and China decades ahead. 

Much before China, India was offered the UNSC seat. For the world powers of that movement, after India and China began their sovereign journeys, India as a democratic nation and China as a communist dictatorship, China was like a pariah. India, in fact, was offered the permanent UNSC membership, in 1950, in 1955 and other times but Pundit Nehru blundered here in counting China's goodwill in making his mind. Whenever it came to a decision in this regard, Nehru always thought what China would do (and not what such a big change could do to India's future). 

©SantoshChaubey